Bertien van Manen

Originally commissioned by the Swiss Ministry for Foreign Affairs to photograph immigrants in the suburbs of Paris, van Manen ultimately expanded the project to the homes of individuals in countries as diverse as Lithunia, Greece, Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Bulgaria, Moldovia and Holland. Van Manen was intrigued by the photographs her subjects choose to keep and to display; the ones immigrants chose to take with them from their homelands; and the ones others chose to contain their memories and delineate their personal histories. As she noted in her interview for Art Review Magazine (Dykstra, October 2005) “Very human things like death and birth and happiness and family are in all the pictures.” Seen together the photographs trace a rough history of Europe from World War I soldiers to a concentration camp of the Holocaust to political demonstrations in Spain and the last of the coal miners in England. The images are thoughtful and poignant, especially in light of the rapid development of digital technology, which threatens to make the family snapshot obsolete.